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Offshore Agile Development
Volume 2 number 2 - February 2007
This
month, we return to the topic of offshore Agile development - no longer an
anomaly but an increasingly attractive option for developers and consultants
alike. Most companies start with some co-located Agile experience and then
transition to offshore teams. However, others jump right into distributed Agile
projects, and then factor in the time and cultural differences when involving
teams in different countries or companies. Regardless of the approach, the
numbers are growing. Successful offshore Agile teams have begun to discuss
their experiences and share best practices for these challenging projects.
Running
Agile projects with offshore teams is no easy feat. Ross Pettit stresses the
necessity for a shared vision and the importance of operational transparecy.
Levent Gurses shares his experiences in transitioning to offshore Agile
development, looking at organizational models, staff roles, and specific
practices in addition to tools and infrastructure. Steve Mahoney, Sudhir
Chanpuriya, and Chuck Fredrick discuss how they have implemented distributed
Scrum as a means to unify and manage onshore-offshore teams.
Experience
is mounting in Europe and Asia, not just in
the U.S. Henrik Christiansen researched 22 case studies around the world and notes
some interesting ways in which both Agile and plan-driven teams have implemented
offshore Agile practices. Sergey Belov describes StarSoft's "guerilla XP" experiences
with a large European telecom client. And to highlight a large-scale example of
offshore Agile development, I discuss consulting firm Sapient's offshore Agile
approach.
Please feel free to share your offshore and distributed
Agile experiences with the Agile Journal community. Send us your suggestions
for new themes or issues to cover. And, if you'd like to contribute an article
on this or another upcoming topic, go to the "Letters to the Editor" in the
forum at AgileJournal.com
and send us your ideas.
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Editor in Chief
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Scaling Agile Worldwide: Sapient's Distributed Agile Methodology
At Sapient, using Agile processes on distributed and offshore projects is the rule, not the exception. I don't typically focus on a single organization or product in an article but rather on a broader set of Agile development issues. However, in the years that I've worked with Sapient consultants and clients, I've been impressed by the ways in which this company has adapted its practices to suit business needs. At this critical point in Agile development maturity, Sapient distinguishes itself by applying Agile practices to a wide range of projects and project types. This article looks at some of the key success factors that Sapient consultants have found to contribute to their projects' success.
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Making Offshore Agile Work
While the cost-per-developer of offshore development might make it attractive, the benefits frequently fail to materialize. Solutions delivered by offshore teams are all too often characterized by poor solution fitness and quality problems, leading to late delivery and dissatisfied customers. Agile development practices are proven to provide better solutions, but they require a high degree of communication. Adopting them in an offshore environment presents a unique set of challenges. To do it successfully requires all members of the team have a common understanding of:
How everybody is going to work together.
The business problem they're trying to solve.
The project's status.
Agile adoption is far more successful when there is a shared vision in the team for each of these.
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Balancing the 3C's-Communication, Communication, and Communication with Distributed Scrum Processes
Agile processes are successfully executed based upon a strong Scrum process, the team focal point for daily interactions. The key concept behind the Scrum is to have a self-organizing group that can come together, understand what has been accomplished and focus on what still needs to get done. The concept is simple; however the process gets complicated when applied to a distributed or global Agile project in which parts of the team are physically local and part of the team is geographically in another time zone or venue. This article will present a "day in the life" of a typical Scrum meeting that has been successfully used with corporate IT projects as well as county government projects. The article will discuss how US and India Scrum teams interact within the context of an Agile project.
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 | Transitioning to Agile in Onshore-Offshore Distributed Teams
Whether you are concerned that your job is going to be shipped to India[i] or feeling safe that the outsourcing craze is calming down,[ii] the reality remains that we live in a global economy and more and more companies are beginning to explore ways to creating software in distributed and multicultural environments. The Web and the open source movement have demonstrated that it is not only possible to create quality software in a highly distributed and decentralized manner, but also that it "mak...
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 | Case Studies On Bringing Agility to Offshore Software Development
In order to stay competitive, IT companies integrate offshoring and outsourcing in their corporate strategies. When these strategies are implemented it is often found that offshoring is full of challenges and much more difficult than expected. This article suggests that the challenges of offshore software development can be met by using agile values, principles, and practices. First the article will present some of the challenges in offshore development, then it will investigate how agile princi...
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 | CASE STUDY: The Quest for Quality, An Offshore Project Experience
Delivering working software against all odds by using tools, metrics, and guerilla XP tactics
The project that StarSoft Labs implemented for a large multinational telecom company in Europe has been one of the most challenging, unconventional, and rewarding XP exercises for us so far. All development and testing was done 100% offshore in St. Petersburg, Russia, for the remote customer. We built an Intranet resource and project management application. Now, 30 months later, the system has 1500 u...
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 | FEATURED BOOK: Extreme Competition by Peter Fingar
For a "hot off the presses" view of what one of the experts in the BPM and IT communities thinks about how the new "flattened" global economy will impact our industry, take a look at Peter Fingar's recent book "Extreme Competition: Innovation and the Great 21st Century Business Reformation" (see the provocatively illustrated Executive Summary).
In October 2005, Fingar described his (then forthcoming) book as a "wake-up call" for the US. With the new global economy, the US will no longer b...
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